


Time Flies

by thedevilchicken



Category: Top Gun (1986)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Community: smallfandomfest, Growing Old, M/M, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-01
Updated: 2015-07-01
Packaged: 2018-04-07 05:35:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4251321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maverick and Ice meet again. And again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time Flies

**Author's Note:**

> For smallfandomfest 17. The prompt used here is "they never realized how much they would enjoy flying together."

The LAX pilots’ lounge wasn’t exactly Maverick’s favourite place on earth. It was like so many other pilots’ lounges all around the world in that respect because frankly Maverick wasn’t exactly a huge fan of any of them, something about the depressing grey view out over the runways and the stylish but highly uncomfortable chairs that always seemed so welcoming till he actually sat down in them and, of course, the other pilots. Mostly, he wasn’t a fan of other pilots. 

His co-pilot Jackson was wasted, which wasn’t an unusual occurrence. He didn’t despise the guy and it wasn’t like they were planning on flying anytime soon, after all - they’d been back in from JFK for a couple of hours and weren’t heading back out again for a couple of days - but the more he drank the louder and more obnoxious he got, like clockwork, every time. Maverick had long since stopped asking himself why he stuck around after landings with his younger colleague when he knew he was just going to wind up listening to grating laughter and sports stories he’d hear ten times before because honestly he was acutely aware why it was; he was avoiding his soon-to-be-ex-wife and the divorce attorneys with what he thought was considerable skill. He’d gotten good at it over the years, through divorces one and two. He knew he really ought to be good at it.

Three others had joined them at the table maybe an hour earlier, two guys and a woman all in the same black airline uniforms that Maverick was still wearing then, gold bands at their cuffs, wings at their chest, matching caps long since abandoned on top of holdalls and small carry-ons all clumped together by the table. Maverick leaned back heavily, eyes closing as he leaned his head over the low back of the seat and rested the bottom of the cool glass of whiskey against his forehead for a moment, feeling like the oldest, drunkest guy in the world. His head hurt, he was tired right down to his bones, he’d be developing some sort of bed sore in the not too distant future if he didn’t get up off his ass and walk around at least a little and still he did _not_ want to go home. The place was too big for one guy and there’d probably be mail from one attorney or another even if his pre-nup was pretty damn solid. Even the ever-increasing volume of his colleagues whose names he was sure he was meant to know but couldn’t quite recall couldn’t persuade him he should leave. 

“Maverick.”

Conversation came to an abrupt halt. He opened his eyes, craned his neck back over the back of the seat and almost dropped his drink. 

“Ice,” he said.

***

The first time Maverick saw Iceman after Top Gun, Ice put him in the hospital. 

Mav had been over in Annapolis teaching a couple of ad hoc aviation classes to academy plebes in the early summer and there was Ice, playing fucking _lacrosse_ of all things out on the sports field when Maverick came out of class; he’d have known that voice anywhere, even if the helmet and the distance between them hid his face pretty effectively. Ice was yelling at a teammate. It seemed like he hadn’t changed a bit in six years.

Maverick stopped by the edge of the field, a couple of midshipmen from his class still trailing behind in a vague attempt at asking pertinent questions they probably hoped would get them extra credit and he answered them in what he was sure later on, when he thought back over the day, was pretty much the least helpful manner he’d ever experienced in his life. He’d been too busy watching Ice as he pulled off his gloves and made his way over to the bleachers to grab a bottle of water from an ice-filled cooler. It was so damn hot out that Mav was sweating into his whites and Ice, once he’d set his helmet down on the ground and stuffed his gloves down into it, tipped half the bottle of water over his own head and flicked half of the rest at a nearby teammate. Mav could hear them laugh as a trickle of sweat made its way down the line of his spine. He turned away. 

The midshipmen seemed better satisfied with his second round of answers and jogged away after that, books under arms, leaving him there mercifully alone. He wasn’t staying at the academy, had a buddy or two stationed there teaching who’d offered him their hospitality for a couple of nights and so he’d be back on his way to cold beer and couch-surfing as soon as he got his ass off the grounds. He headed for his rental car, some kind of shitty age-old SUV the navy had provided once he’d made it there to Maryland, big and gas-guzzling with air conditioning that crapped out half the time. He tossed his hat onto the passenger side seat and was about to climb on in himself and brave the near molten vinyl seats when he heard footfalls there behind him, jogging, sneakers against asphalt. 

He saw Ice’s reflection in the glass of one window before he actually saw _him_ , teammates walking not too far behind. Mav turned and leaned against the side of the car, ignoring the near volcanic heat against his back, and crossed his arms over his chest. Maybe he hadn’t been prepared to see him on the field, maybe he hadn’t been wild on the notion of speaking to him, but stubbornly he knew he didn’t have to show it.

“Leaving without saying hey?” Ice said, helmet and stick in hand, shirt and hair wet from water and sweat. His dog tags were hanging down his back tucked out of the way, chain resting over his throat and he looked _exactly_ the same. For a second it was like six years hadn’t passed at all, like Maverick wasn’t celebrating his 30th in a couple of weeks. It was like being back in the sand in Miramar, around a volleyball net in the sun with Ice and Slider and Goose. 

And so Mav said something snide. Afterwards he had no clue what in the blue hell he’d said except he remembered saying _something_ , remembered Ice’s damn smirk fading, remembered how he’d had no goddamn warning aside from that before Ice threw a punch and laid him out. He remembered his lip splitting against his own teeth, the fight bite from it Ice was going to have on his knuckles for weeks. What he didn’t remember was hitting his head on the way down, catching his jaw on the SUV’s crappy old running board and getting himself knocked out. Christ, that had _not_ been his intention. 

***

“Who the hell is Maverick?” Jackson asked. 

“ _I_ am.”

“Bullshit you are!”

He hadn’t gone by _Maverick_ in years, ten years, maybe more now he thought about it. Carole still wrote it on her Christmas cards and called him it when they talked on the phone now and then but pretty much everyone else who’d known him as Maverick was so far from his life now that sometimes he almost forgot he’d ever had a call sign at all. It was like he’d always been Captain Mitchell, always worn that damn civilian uniform with its gold bands and tight collar, never been a serviceman at all. 

“You know this guy?” Jackson asked.

Maverick laughed and finally righted his head, pulled himself up in his seat and set his glass down before he could go ahead and spill it all over himself. “Yeah, I know him,” he confirmed, rubbing at his eyes. He glanced back over his shoulder at Ice and his companion for a second; the younger guy was a seaman carrying baggage and looking stiffly like he’d rather be anywhere else on earth but there’d been a change in stripes at the shoulder bars of Ice’s blues: another promotion, which Mav guessed made sense considering how damn long it had been. “Lady and gents, Commander Kazansky, US Navy.”

Ice smiled. Maverick watched as he came closer and he offered his hand to Jackson then the nameless others and he _smiled_ , charming, like this all made perfect sense. Someone asked him to join them and so he did, pulling up a chair and waving the anonymous seaman in, too. He took off his hat, set it down on the table and Christ if his hair wasn’t just the same as it always had been. Somehow the bastard had aged twenty years without his hair aging a day. It irked Maverick irrationally, or maybe that was just the vodka.

They’d let him into the pilots’ lounge out of courtesy, Ice said, something about there being a mix-up on base and his transport wouldn’t be available till morning so there he was, stuck in a civilian airport with his assistant and nowhere to go for hours after a lengthy flight in from DC. He told them all to call him Tom and so they did. Maverick couldn’t find the enthusiasm to call him anything at all but that didn’t matter; the others did enough talking for him, happily drunk as they all were. 

And when Jackson asked how the two of them met, Ice looked looked at Mav for one long moment. For that moment, it was like they’d never left. 

“Top Gun,” Maverick said. 

***

After the MiGs, they both went back to Miramar. 

Maverick guessed it was the best place for him then, not just because he was so damn _good_ but because it was going to be a while before anyone really trusted he was back in full control after Goose’s death. Eventually he guessed they’d assign him a new RIO and put him back up in a Tomcat so Miramar was as good a place to idle as any other was. Ice, on the other hand, was there for reasons Maverick never really discerned, not that he spent a whole lot of time or effort trying to.

They’d never realised how much they’d enjoy flying together. In the single-seat planes of Top Gun instructors it was just the two of them against a whole class of naval aviators and it turned out that somewhere between Ice’s calm precision and Maverick’s reckless disregard of anything approaching the rules there was actually a mid-point that they pulled each other into. Ice started taking risks and the effect was pretty dizzying. Mav actually started playing as a member of the team and it was then that it all came together. They’d both been pretty goddamn skeptical about the whole idea of working together but it turned out they had something to contribute after all. Viper hadn’t seemed surprised.

Of course, on the ground nothing had changed at all.

They saw just one graduating class as a team before Mav got the news that he and Merlin had been assigned together; he’d be shipping back out for the Indian Ocean, something about him deputising under the Enterprise’s CAG. It was a good way to get promoted. It was a career path all laid out for him that had nothing to do with the place that Goose had died. He could’ve said no; they put it to him as an offer and not an order. He said yes anyway. 

“You’re an ass,” Ice told him. 

Maverick laughed sharply as he pulled one foot onto the locker room bench to tie his boots. “Enlighten me,” he said. “What’ve I done this time?”

“You took the assignment.”

Mav glanced at him. Ice was standing at the end of the row of lockers, hands on hips there in his service khakis. He looked pissed. Maverick found that amusing. 

“What, did _you_ want it?”

Ice gave a long-suffering sigh, the one that always said nothing so much as _I can’t believe you’re so fucking dense_. “You’re not as good without me, Maverick.”

“And still what I hear is _you’re_ not as good without _me_.”

It was dumb and it was petty but Maverick didn’t feel a whole hell of a lot like being well-reasoned or calm at that particular moment, pretty much never did and never had around Ice. Maybe that was why he turned to him, still just half-dressed, an antagonistic little smile on his face once his bootlaces were firmly double knotted. Maybe that was why he went on, what he said just the wrong side of teasing, just a hair’s breadth from insult as he sauntered up closer. Maybe he just wanted to feel like he’d firmly dissolved whatever stilted camaraderie they’d formed before he flew back out to the Enterprise, so he’d be free of it for his fresh new start. Of course, maybe it was nothing so complex.

He was crossing the line and he knew it. The problem was he hadn’t figured out exactly _which_ line he’d crossed until he’d pressed Ice up against the locker room door, fingers in his hair, hand shoved straight down his pants and Ice was kissing him so hard he thought he’d feel it for a week. They’d brought each other off in a little under ten minutes, Mav’s head reeling the whole time, Ice’s hand around his cock, his own hand practically cramping from the odd angle he’d needed to sustain to get it down around Ice’s erection. It wasn’t comfortable. It was really fucking dumb. And then Maverick turned and walked away.

They didn’t speak again before he left. They had nothing else to say.

***

“It’s been what, fifteen years?” Ice said. 

Maverick shook his head. “Twenty.”

He was discharged from the navy at 33 years of age. He’d asked to go. He couldn’t think of much of a reason to stay, which he guessed was the problem.

His first civilian job was teaching bored housewives how to fly out of a private airfield in California. It wasn’t a bad gig and it paid well, meant he got to spend a hell of a lot of time in the air and the ladies weren’t exactly painful company; he smiled a lot and got himself caught up with girls he ought not to more than once but there was something inherently tame and sad about flying such underpowered, undersexed excuses for aircraft when he was used to the cockpit of an F-14. A couple of years and more illicit propositions than he could count on both hands and both feet together, he started looking for a new job.

He qualified as a commercial pilot in next to no time at all - sure, the passenger jets were pretty complex but he’d been flying since practically before he could walk and hell, nothing quite compared to the stick of the Tomcat. He flew private flights in the beginning and then short-haul routes out of LA for a while, Vegas and Phoenix and over the border down into Mexico a few times a week, bored but finding the pay wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. It wasn’t exactly a dogfight on a daily basis - so much of his job was keeping passengers happy and letting kids nose around the cockpit - but he could deal with that, he thought. It was only temporary.

He told himself he’d get out soon, find something else, sign up as a test pilot to fly crazy new shit, get himself a seaplane and run charter flights over in the Caribbean, but five years passed and then ten. His first divorce passed in stubborn acrimony. He flew Concorde for a couple of years, maybe enjoyed it in a quiet way, then picked up a route from the eastern seaboard out to Europe. Second wife was French and fiery and ten times smarter than he ever was, which was probably exactly why it ended in divorce. Fifteen years. _Twenty_. Senior pilot. He’d never had his seaplane. He wasn’t sure if he regretted it or not; after all, it wasn’t like he hadn’t kept busy. There just wasn’t much to show for it but ex-wives and a house he was avoiding. He’d never even had kids.

There’d been times when he’d missed it, though, the military, the navy. So he’d pulled dumb stunts like taking time out from his job and signing on to fly in air displays just to get behind the stick of a fighter jet again, flight suit and aviator glasses and smiles for the crowd as he slipped into the cockpit of whatever barely-airworthy piece of crap they had to offer. More than 50 years old then, sitting in that godforsaken pilots’ lounge, his hobby seemed less like fun and more like he was trying to relive some kind of a heyday that he’d never really had at all. Sometimes he wished he hadn’t left the navy. Sometimes he knew exactly why he had. 

“I should get home,” he said, suddenly, interrupting conversation. Jackson looked at him and then shrugged drunkenly; Jackson never gave a damn where his pilot went as long as he wasn’t drinking alone. “Commander, it was…” He made a vague gesture that did nothing to elucidate his point as he stood and fished for his cap and his bag. Ice watched him do it. “I’ll see you around.” Maybe in another twenty years, if either of them was still alive. 

He left and Ice watched him leave. Ice didn’t say a word.

***

He’d been in the hospital for two days with a giant concussion, throwing up until a bowl every time he ate, woken up all through the night just to make sure he hadn’t lapsed into a coma or some such cheerful bullshit. By the time 48 hours were almost up, he felt like he was going mad. It was that precise moment that Ice chose to waltz on in. 

“Turn your ass around and march right out the way you came,” Mav said, with more conviction to his tone than he’d realised he had in him. 

Ice did nothing of the sort. He loitered in the doorway for a moment in his khakis, his hat tucked neatly under his arm, and then stepped into the room. He closed the door and once he’d deposited his hat on the table at the foot of the hospital bed he took the seat beside it. Mav just shook his head and closed his eyes, rested his forearm down on top of them dramatically. He was too sick for this shit, and Ice had caused it.

“So you’re here to finish me off?”

One of Maverick’s academy teacher buddies had stopped by, told him what had happened, filled in the blanks from what he’d heard of the details that apparently Ice and his lacrosse team full of academy instructors had told the master-at-arms after the incident, while Mav had been winging his way to the hospital. It turned out Ice was on temporary assignment there too, teaching for a year before taking Jester’s position back over in California. He’d been promoted a couple of years earlier, his buddy said, and Mav tried not to feel jealous at that. LCDR Kazansky was somehow, in some vague way, senior to LCDR Mitchell in more than just the damned three-year difference in their ages. He could almost resent that.

“You’re an ass,” Ice said. 

“You’re the one who put me in the hospital, Kazansky.” 

“That was an accident.”

“And here I thought you didn’t _have_ accidents.”

Ice paused, like he was considering this, like he was considering it carefully. He ran one hand over his hair and Maverick watched it spring back up into place like he hadn’t touched it at all, somehow infuriating. 

“I don’t,” Ice said. “Just around you.”

Maverick laughed but it hurt and that fact shut him up more effectively than Ice ever had. He screwed his eyes shut under the forearm that was still resting over them and that was why he didn’t see Ice move; he heard it and maybe he should’ve looked but he still felt like hammered out crap lying there in the too-hot hospital bed. He didn’t look and maybe he assumed Ice was going to turn and leave because frankly, honestly, he had no idea why he’d even come in the first place. Except Ice didn’t leave. His footsteps didn’t head for the door. He stopped by the bed instead.

Mav didn’t look when Ice’s hands found the edge of the bed sheet. He didn’t look when Ice peeled that sheet back, down past Maverick’s knees, didn’t look when he felt the mattress dip as Ice sat himself down. He definitely didn’t look when Ice’s hot hand caught the hem of his hospital gown and tugged it up, right up to his waist, leaving him bare waist to knee in the bed. He should’ve protested as Ice’s fingers closed around his cock but he went from 0 to 100 in about 15 seconds and then Ice’s mouth was on him, around him, even hotter than that damn room in that goddamn hospital. He would’ve laughed again except he knew it’d hurt. 

That was when he _did_ look. He guessed it was just as well that all the blinds were closed because fuck, there was nothing subtle about it; Ice was sitting there in his pristine service khakis, oak leaves on the collar, leaning over with his mouth around Mav’s cock. He did laugh then, and covered his eyes again as the room began to spin. It didn’t last long. Mav was too keyed up, his jaw throbbed like a son of a bitch and Ice kept doing this _thing_ with his tongue that made him squirm against the bed despite himself. He muffled a shout as he came because hell if he was having a nurse come to see what was going on in his room. 

After, Ice calmly crossed the room and spat into the sink. Maverick just lay there and watched him wash out his mouth with water. He swiped the back of one hand over his faintly reddened lips as he turned back around to him. 

“Jesus Christ, Ice.” 

Ice didn’t even have the decency to look awkward about it, never mind apologetic. He smirked. He left. Once he was gone, Mav realised he’d never actually apologised for giving him the fucking concussion, either. 

But hell, he guessed at least now he knew what Ice meant by _accident_.

***

Ice caught him in the elevator. 

Mav wasn’t expecting it, the clichéd hand in the closing doors, and then Ice was there, stepping calmly inside like he hadn't just sprinted from the lounge with his holdall over one shoulder and his cap under the other, as the doors slid shut behind him. Maverick sighed and leaned back against the wall of the elevator there behind him, resting his head back. It had been twenty years and still the guy got under his skin. Maybe he always would.

They rode down in silence. Ice didn’t look at him but he did look at Ice; he’d changed, of course, but the gap between 30-something and 50-something had been pretty damn kind to him. His eyes were still sharp, jawline still crisp, waist still pretty trim under his jacket though Mav suspected he wasn’t still playing lacrosse back in Annapolis. After all, he’d already told the little group of assembled commercial airline pilots back in the lounge that he’d been commander of the Navy Fighter Weapons School for the past six years, out at NAS Fallon, Nevada. After a quick stop by his immediate superior there in California he’d be back out to Fallon for his next promotion ceremony. Ice would be made captain in a week, birds on his uniform instead of wings. He’d be taking over the entire goddamn base soon thereafter.

He knew Ice was following him when he left the elevator and headed outside. He didn’t stop him, didn’t speak, didn’t even really give a damn about the looks the two of them were getting from the general public in the terminal, the civilian pilot and the navy commander both in full uniform. He was too damn drunk to drive so he hailed a cab and didn’t react when Ice tossed his bag into the trunk along with his and stepped into the back seat alongside him. The whole 40-minute drive in midnight traffic they made in total silence, the driver apparently taking the hint after the first eight or nine minutes and shutting the fuck up with his incessant chatter while Mav played with the braids at his cuffs. He paid him and got out at the end of his drive, didn’t wait for Ice before heading to the door. He left the door wide open behind him and Ice followed him inside. Maverick watch as Ice locked the door with the keys he’d left in it and tossed them onto the table by the door, dropped his bag next to it, hung up his hat on the stand where Maverick had already deposited his own. 

“I don’t remember saying you could come in,” he said. 

“I don’t remember you telling me not to,” Ice replied. 

Maverick had to concede that point. 

“The bedroom’s this way,” he said instead and headed for it, not surprised at all to find Ice followed. 

It was a bad idea. It was the mother of all bad ideas. Mav pulled off his uniform coat and threw it over the back of a chair, loosened his tie as Ice stepped in behind him. Ice finished off the tie himself, Mav’s hands hanging awkwardly at his sides as Ice’s chest brushed his back, hot even through both their shirts. Ice unbuttoned Maverick’s shirt, untucked it from his belt, pulled it back over his shoulders and tossed it to the floor and Mav didn’t think to complain. He supposed he should’ve. 

They both paused to unlace shoes, pull off socks, and it was _such_ a bad idea, should’ve stopped there. Mav looked at Ice, barefoot but still in most of the rest of his uniform and he couldn’t stop the laughter bubbling up, just like he’d totally fucking lost it, but Ice didn’t seem to care. He stepped in again, bare feet on cold tiled floor, and unbuckled Maverick’s belt. Mav’s hands went to Ice’s shirt. He didn’t stop. He had no clue why he didn’t.

They wound up naked on the bed in front of the doors that led out onto the terrace by the pool and Mav knew it was dumb not to close the blinds but decided that was the least of his problems when he was sitting there on his knees with Ice pressed up behind him. Ice’s hands spread over Mav’s thighs as his cock pressed hard to the small of his back, as his mouth pressed in hot to the side of his neck. One hand went up, bypassed Maverick’s erection and skimmed his chest, rested lightly over his throat and Mav turned his head as far around as he could; Ice’s thumb traced the small scar at his jaw and Mav chuckled irrationally under his breath. 

Ice had put that scar there, that day in the parking lot. He’d been thinking about him every time he saw it for twenty years and fuck if he didn’t see it every day. In that moment it was just like Ice knew it.

Maverick didn’t volunteer the fact that there were condoms and lube in the drawer by the bed but Ice found them anyway. He didn’t protest when Ice pushed him down to his hands and knees, just bit back whatever sound it was his dumbass body wanted him to make when Ice’s hands went to his hips and he pushed on into him with a couple of fits and starts. It wasn’t like he didn’t want it. It wasn’t like he hadn’t wanted it since Miramar.

Maybe that was why he didn’t last long. Ice’s hand went down, took hold of him, stroked not quite roughly and it shouldn’t have felt so familiar or so good. There’d been others, of course there had, three wives and ten times as many flings, affairs, weekends where he was stuck in another country with pretty much nothing else to do. Some of them had even been guys, awkward blow jobs in the front seats of cars, a hotel in London, one co-pilot years ago who was intent on joining the mile high club and Mav couldn’t say he objected to the idea. He’d never lacked for a sex life but right then at 51 years old he felt exactly like a goddamn teenager. He came all over Ice’s hand and the bedspread, abruptly, unexpectedly, heart hammering hard as he cursed out loud and brought Ice off with him with a breathless laugh. 

“I know I’m good, but…” Ice trailed off, amused. His thumbs traced a path from the dimples at the small of Mav’s back down to the cleft of his ass and Mav sighed, suddenly acutely aware of the fact that Ice was still inside him. 

“You’re the same arrogant dick you were twenty years ago,” he said, rubbing his face. 

“And you turned morose,” Ice replied. “When did that happen?”

Mav just laughed. The son of a bitch was right; he _had_ gotten morose. Somewhere along the line he’d lost himself completely. It had never occurred to him to care.

***

Ice called three days later; Mav was in DC getting ready for the flight back into LA and when his cellphone rang with a number he didn’t recognise he answered it more out of exhaustion than choice. 

“Come out to Fallon,” Ice said. Mav didn’t ask him how he’d found his number; he wasn’t sure he even wanted to know. “My promotion’s in four days.”

He told him to go fuck himself and turned up in Nevada four days later anyway, wondering what the hell he was doing. A visiting admiral pinned the birds on Ice’s collar points and Mav felt faintly jealous as he watched, wondered what he might have done himself if he hadn’t convinced himself to quit. Ice’s gaze flickered over to him, though, as the admiral pinned the second bird in place. Ice smiled. Maverick found himself smiling back. He could've kicked himself for it but it'd been so damn long since he'd felt any particularly cordial feeling toward the world at large that he decided to just let it slide. 

Ice had never married, it turned out. He lived alone with memorabilia of his career and photos of his sister's family all over his house, nieces and nephews who lived somewhere back east; she'd apparently seen fit to marry Slider who was still stationed out that way. Mav looked over all the photos as Ice took off his uniform coat and hung it up out of the way, the family shots, the snaps from ships with Ice and Slider standing there in their flight suits, their Top Gun class and there Mav was with Goose before the crash. He'd got a copy of the same shot on his study wall back in LA. Even if Miramar was Marine Corps now, the program moved to Fallon, they still had it in common. 

They made out on Ice's couch like it was going out of style and Maverick felt like a damn fool old man but couldn't quite bring himself to care all that much about it. He was getting softer in the middle in spite of all his early-morning runs and touchy-feely yoga classes that the most recent ex-Mrs Mitchell had introduced him to, had sciatica now and then and wore glasses to read or drive or fly a plane. Ice had broken his wrist playing volleyball, he said, screwed it up further in some kind of botched parachuting stunt that seemed entirely out of character and wore a brace on it at night. Mav watched him put it on, later, after, bitching naked in bed except for a wrist brace and his dog tags. He fell asleep with Ice's tags in his hand, the weight familiar but the lettering not so much.

They argued in the morning until Ice told him to fuck off back to LA. He did. Then they spent an hour jerking off over the phone before they both went to sleep in different states. They did it again the next day and then argued again the day after. Mav felt that pretty much summed to their whole relationship.

He moved to Reno three months later, feeling like a total ass as he started work for a local company running tourists to casinos and over to Tahoe. The commute to Fallon was less of a pain in the ass from there. He told himself that wasn’t why he did it. He assumed Ice thought it was and didn’t correct him. 

They flew together in an air show four months later, in the summer; he’d forgotten how well they flew together and in front of a crowd it was exhilarating. Ice owned a little two-seat passenger plane and they went up together in that after, sometimes, taking turns at the stick and arguing over who got to go first till they tossed a coin and then accused each other of cheating. Mav finally learned so sail on the lake, which he thought was pretty good timing considering he’d been out of the navy for two decades and Ice laughed at him, just antagonising enough to make it that much hotter when they anchored the small yacht screwed below deck in the sunshine through portholes. Mav embarrassed him with karaoke in bars and sometimes they drank too much together, wound up at Ice’s and he wouldn’t leave for three days. He quit the airline, took the early retirement he’d been saving for for years, spent his days giving the occasional private flying class or maybe just flying for the hell of it. It didn’t matter that Ice’s plane wasn’t a jet, it just mattered that he was airborne.

“Move in,” Ice said. “You practically live here anyway.” 

“Fuck you, Ice,” Mav said, beside him in his bed, but they moved in together six months later. _Don’t Ask Don’t Tell_ was maybe a thing of the past but it still gave Mav pause until Ice sighed that long-suffering sigh and Mav finally relented. There’d been no real secret to it for months by then, after all, the worst kept secret in Fallon, and the only important people left in Mav’s life were Carole and her kids and they didn’t give a damn who he lived with, just as long as he was happy. He _was_ happy. 

“We could’ve had this all this time,” Ice said, one day, for no particular reason except he was looking at the photo, two identical photos of identical people in different frames that hung side-by-side on the living room wall. 

Mav laughed, nudged him with his shoulder. “We’d have killed each other,” he said. Ice smirked his smirky smile like he’d said it and not Maverick and Mav just rolled his eyes. And then he looked at the photo, too. 

They’d never be the same as they were then, Mav thought, but they weren’t entirely different. either; they still called each other Maverick and Ice and bitched and bickered and fought just like they always had. He thought maybe it had taken thirty years for them to change enough to be who they needed to be to be together. Somehow that didn’t seem like a waste. 

***

Ice never made it to admiral but he didn’t seem to care; he retired a captain at the crotchety age of 57 and they moved away from Fallon. 

They went together; they went back to Miramar.


End file.
